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Friday, April 28, 2017

Valediction

by Terry Richard Bazes

Although
we were strangers when I was a young man, in time my father and I became very
good friends. It was, I think, the experience of being business partners that
did it—an unlikely circumstance since neither of us knew anything about real
estate. But somehow, we got caught up, knee-deep in the subdivision of a one
hundred-year-old Chappaqua estate where we were decidedly the interlopers. In
that improbable heyday of our time together, we bought stock, bartered and
schemed. I navigated the politics of a fractious stepfamily, and he lent money
that he couldn’t afford to lose—and worried so much that he lived on Tums.
Eventually he got his money back and we made our profit—and our friendship. “I
didn’t think you had it in you,” he said.

After
that—when I lived far away and had sons of my own—my father and I spoke mostly on the phone. At
first, in that shy way of his, he wouldn’t quite know what to say, and so there’d be a moment’s
silence until I would find a way
to begin. But there werealways
all the things we didn’t say—not because they couldn’t be said, but because
there was something more articulate in the noiseless depth of feeling between
us. And so, when I went down to
Florida to visit him, I always sat beside him and it never really mattered what
we talked about.

Like
so many of his generation, my father had never entirely recovered from the
terrors of the Great Depression. Although he had succeeded admirably—financially
and as a surgeon—the fear of poverty that had seemed so close when he was
seventeen still haunted him in his nineties. Mostly because he had been so
generous and made my life so comfortable, I never completely understood what
had terrified him so.

But I
did understand that, although his family had never lost everything, he had felt
that they were on the brink of ruin—and the panic he had felt had driven him to
succeed. This indelible fear, even in his prosperous old age, lay behind the
way he obsessively focused all his brilliance on the stock market—and behind
the urgency of his insistence that I count my change and that I keep my wallet
in my front pocket. Of course, I knew that he was thinking of his own father
then.

At the
height of the Depression, my grandfather, Sam, lost a hundred-dollar bill. It
was my father who found it again, lying in a gutter.

This
one episode of my father’s young manhood seems to sum up the saga of my
grandfather’s bad luck and of my father’s life-long drive to get back what had
been lost. I never knew my grandfather because he died long before I was born. But
I’ve heard stories about him—that he was a bon vivant who owned a racehorse,
that he loved to gamble, that he lifted weights with his teeth, and that he was
(according to our cousin Rosette) “the most generous man I ever knew.” I’ve
never been able to reconcile these stories with the photo I have of him
standing between his two boys, in
a cardigan sweater,with the eyes of a
broken old man. This picture must have been taken after the crash of ’29, after
hisfur business went bust.

By the
time my father needed to pay the tuition for medical school, my grandfather had
no moneyto
offer. When my father started selling his own blood to raise cash, I know
that my grandfather was heartsick. But I also know that it was from his father that my father learned
his excessive generosity—that he always gave me too much so that I would never
suffer the terror he had felt.Maybe
it was because his own father had been unable to provide for him that my father
became, for we who loved him, such a bastion of capability and brilliance. Gambling was another of my
grandfather’s legacies to him. For my father, in his own way, was a gambler
too—yet never improvident like his own father, but with a shrewd, poker
player’s instinct for how to play his hand.

He
made so much money from playing poker in the army that he had enough to open
his first medical office.That was
because he had an extremely intuitive practicality, an uncanny ability to grasp
the facts of a situation and find a solution. Even my mother’s father—that
impossible old man who had been my father’s professor in medical school—conceded
that he was the finest diagnostician he had ever known. For he was,
quintessentially, the doctor. I will always remember him, when I was little and
he
came to kiss me good night after surgery, with the smell of ether on his face.
He belonged to the last generation that still made house-calls, and my memories
of what he was to me in my childhood—when I rode in the backseat with his black
leather bag—are infused with the security of his quiet strength. When, as a
little boy, I fell and cut my lip, he was there to sew me up. When I nearly
died from pneumonia, he was there to heal me. He was doubly the giver of my
life, both my father and my doctor.

as a doctor he had a way with
people and would take the time to explain what they needed to hear.

For he
had a faith in human worth: it was an integral part of his optimism. He
traveled all over the world, as soon as he could afford it—and gave up a
lucrative medical practice in order to donate his skillsin Afghanistan.

Any
kind of trip would put him in one of his expansive moods, when all things
seemed possible, an effusive excitement that there was something more to be
seen that would gratify his curiosity and hope. He was never happier than when
he was moving. “All will be well,” he often said.

But
then, even to him, it happened—the failing eyesight, then the blindness, then
the hallucinations which—at first—he knew weren’t real.

And
then came the broken legs, the frailty and his falling asleep even in the
middle of a sentence.

One
afternoon I got the call that he’d be dead within a day and that I’d better fly
down if I ever wanted to see him again. So I got on a plane and, by the time I
arrived in Florida, he was unconscious and breathing only two or three times a
minute. But by that night
he was sitting in a chair and talking: he had come back from the brink of
death. And when I told him how infrequently he’d been breathing, he diagnosed
himself—in that dispassionate, scientific way of his—saying that it sounded
like “Cheyne-Stokes respiration” and adding that he “must have been far gone.”

And
for those few, precious hours he was altogether himself again and we talked and
talked and talked late into the night. We spoke of many things, but, beneath the surface of the
words we spoke, the real
subject was the understanding we had reached—and in his own quiet, deep,
understated way, he blessed me.

And
when he lay dying, I sat beside his bed and asked him questions so I could hear
him tell me all the old stories one last time. He told me again how his first
memory was of walking up the Grand Concourse with his Uncle Max and buying a
newspaper that announced the end of World War One. And he told me again that
his father had never allowed him to work with him as a flesher in the fur
factory, but had saved him for something better, and fulfilling his father’s
prediction he had been the young prince, the prodigy who’d skipped so many
grades that he graduated first in his class from Columbia College when he was justnineteen.
Thinking of when the family lived on Fox Street, I asked where had Grandma’s
sisters lived, and where was Uncle Rome’s store? And what was the name of his
first grade teacher who had complained about him to Grandma because he was too
defiant? And did he remember the street address of the elegant Imperator
apartment building on Riverside Drive where the family had lived when they were
plush? Because I knew I was losing him forever, I made him tell me again about
our crazy Brenner cousins, who’d cornered the karakul trade and been held for
ransom by Chinese bandits, and about the troop plane he was on that nearly went
down in a storm when he was stationed up in Gander, and about how in the army
he’d made a bundle playing poker and caught so many lobsters that he only ate
the tails.

But
there was one story I needed to hear more than all the others.

And
so, though he could barely talk, I asked him to tell me again how, during the
Depression, when the family had lost all their money and couldn’t afford to
send him to medical school, he and his brother Joe had gone to the races and
bet everything they had on a long shot. For the very last time, he told me how
the miracle had happened, how the horses in the lead had fallen but their long
shot had kept driving on. Lying there on his pillow with his eyes closed he
told me how, when—against all odds—their horse had come in first, he’d stuffed
the winnings in his jacket pocket. And then he and his brother Joe had walked
out through the crowd together, side by side, pressed close against one another
to keep the money safe.

“How
many horses fell?” I asked him.

“Every
one but ours.”

Terry Richard Bazes is the author of Lizard World
and of Goldsmith’s Return. His personal essays and fiction have appeared
in a number of publications, including The Washington Post Book World,
Newsday, Columbia Magazine, Travelers’ Tales: Spain, Lost Magazine, and
the Evergreen Review.